Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies re-examines the field’s foundational assumptions by identifying and critically analyzing eighteen of its key terms. Each essay investigates a single term (e.g., feminism, interdisciplinarity, intersectionality) by asking how it has come to be understood and mobilized in Women’s and Gender Studies and then explicates the roles it plays in both producing and shutting down possible versions of the field. The goal of the book is to trace and expose critical paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions embedded in the language of Women’s and Gender Studies—from its high theory to its casual conversations—that relies on these key terms. Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies offers a fresh approach to structuring Feminist Theory, Senior Capstone, and introductory graduate-level courses in Women’s and Gender Studies.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s Collaborative Book Prize 2017 Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies is a volume of essays by leading scholars in the field of early modern studies on the history, present state, and future possibilities of feminist criticism and theory. It responds to current anxieties that feminist criticism is in a state of decline by attending to debates and differences that have emerged in light of ongoing scholarly discussions of race, affect, sexuality, and transnationalism-work that compels us continually to reassess our definitions of ’women’ and gender. Rethinking Feminism demonstrates how studies of early modern literature, history, and culture can contribute to a reimagination of feminist aims, methods, and objects of study at this historical juncture. While the scholars contributing to Rethinking Feminism have very different interests and methods, they are united in their conviction that early modern studies must be in dialogue with, and indeed contribute to, larger theoretical and political debates about gender, race, and sexuality, and to the relationship between these areas. To this end, the essays not only analyze literary texts and cultural practices to shed light on early modern ideology and politics, but also address metacritical questions of methodology and theory. Taken together, they show how a consciousness of the complexity of the past allows us to rethink the genealogies and historical stakes of current scholarly norms and debates.

Provides a contemporary response to such landmark volumes as All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave and This Bridge Called My Back. More than thirty years have passed since the publication of All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Given the growth of women’s and gender studies in the last thirty-plus years, this updated and responsive collection expands upon this transformation of consciousness through multiracial feminist perspectives. The contributors here reflect on transnational issues as diverse as intimate partner violence, the prison industrial complex, social media, inclusive pedagogies, transgender identities, and (post) digital futures. This volume provides scholars, activists, and students with critical tools that can help them decenter whiteness and other power structures while repositioning marginalized groups at the center of analysis. “Are All the Women Still White? blends traditions of feminist-of-color struggle with the innovative insights of twenty-first-century thinkers, artists, and activists. For anyone engaged in inclusive, multi-issued work, this book is indispensable.” — Barbara Smith, Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith

Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies is a text-reader that offers instructors a new way to approach an introductory course on women’s and gender studies. This book highlights major concepts that organize the diverse work in this field: Knowledges, Identities, Equalities, Bodies, Places, and Representations. Its focus on "the everyday" speaks to the importance this book places on students understanding the taken-for granted circumstances of their daily lives. Precisely because it is not the same for everyone, the everyday becomes the ideal location for cultivating students’ intellectual capacities as well as their political investigations and interventions. In addition to exploring each concept in detail, each chapter includes up to five short recently published readings that illuminate an aspect of that concept. Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies explores the idea that "People are different, and the world isn’t fair," and engages students in the inevitably complicated follow-up question, "Now that we know, how shall we live?"

Rethinking Language and Gender Research is the first book focusing on language and gender to explicitly challenge the dichotomy of female and male use of language. It represents a turning point in language and gender studies, addressing the political and social consequences of popular beliefs about women's language and men's language and proposing new ways of looking at language and gender. The essays take a fresh approach to the study of subjects such as language and sex and the use of language to produce and maintain power and prestige. Topics explored in this text include sex and the brain; the language of a rape hearing; teenage language; radio talk show exchanges; discourse strategies of African American women; political implications for language and gender studies; the relationship between sex and gender and the construction of identity through language. A useful introductory chapter sets the articles in context, explaining the relationships that exist between them, and full cross-referencing between articles and an extensive index allow for easy access to information. The interdisciplinary approach of the text, the wide-range of methodologies presented, and the comprehensive review of the current literature will make this book invaluable reading for all upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics, gender and cultural studies.

An anthology of feminist cyberfiction and theoretical and critical writings on gender and technoculture. Most writing on cyberculture is dominated by two almost mutually exclusive visions: the heroic image of the male outlaw hacker and the utopian myth of a gender-free cyberworld. Reload offers an alternative picture of cyberspace as a complex and contradictory place where there is oppression as well as liberation. It shows how cyberpunk's revolutionary claims conceal its ultimate conservatism on matters of class, gender, and race. The cyberfeminists writing here view cyberculture as a social experiment with an as-yet-unfulfilled potential to create new identities, relationships, and cultures. The book brings together women's cyberfiction—fiction that explores the relationship between people and virtual technologies—and feminist theoretical and critical investigations of gender and technoculture. From a variety of viewpoints, the writers consider the effects of rapid and profound technological change on culture, in particular both the revolutionary and reactionary effects of cyberculture on women's lives. They also explore the feminist implications of the cyborg, a human-machine hybrid. The writers challenge the conceptual and institutional rifts between high and low culture, which are embedded in the texts and artifacts of cyberculture.

The second volume of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies addresses the complexities and inherent paradoxes within the expansive knowledge project known as Women’s and Gender Studies for audiences both inside and adjacent to the field. Each of the volume’s chapters identifies and critically examines a key term that circulates in this field, exploring how the term has come to be understood and mobilized within its everyday narratives and practices. In constructing provocative genealogies for their terms, authors explicate the roles that this language, and the narratives attached to it, play in producing and limiting possible versions of the field. The ongoing aim of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies, both in the original volume and this entirely new extension, is to trace and expose important paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions embedded in the field – from its high theory to its casual conversations – that rely on these terms. Forging collective conversation and intellectual community from its thoughtful and critical lines of inquiry, the second volume of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies remains bracingly original and full of fresh insight. It provides a perfect complement for Feminist Theory, Senior Capstone, and introductory graduate-level courses offered in Women’s and Gender Studies and related fields.